Sonic Healthcare Services Case Study

INTRODUCTION
The rapid changes in technology have seen many businesses move to adopt effective ways of remaining competitive through the use of technology. One of the areas that have experienced changes due to technological development is the healthcare sector as Collen and Detmer (2015) mentions. Many companies and practitioners are moving towards using software and other innovative ways through technology to ensure effective healthcare services. Global healthcare limited is one of the leading healthcare software developer in Australia that offers practitioners with advanced software that are more effective in handling patient information for quality services. This report is commenced to outline the general business environment of the company,

The business specializes in providing software for healthcare services with its main customer coming from the healthcare industry. The primary customers of the company are healthcare practitioners, hospitals and health institutions in Australia. The company sells its software online and customers from other countries are able to purchase them online. Some of the major competitors of the company include the iSOFT the largest Australian healthcare software developing company that offers similar services and product to healthcare practitioners. The eHealth Wise, Medicare, Intersystem Australia UBM Australia and ICS Global are some of the companies that have a significant market share in the healthcare software development across Australia. The Sonic healthcare limited which is an American company, has operations in Australia and provides healthcare software to hospitals, community and healthcare

The development of a software and the maintenance requirements are rated high when it comes to cost. It is believed that more than 90% of the cost involved in a particular software goes to maintenance. The fixed costs of production remain lower than the variable costs because they do not vary with the scale of production. On the other hand, the variable costs such as maintenance, monitoring and labour required for software development by the company change with the technicalities involved. As Rawstron et al. (2013) suggests, the nature of a software to be developed determines the number and type of specialist to be sought by the company. The cost of materials also varies with the type of software and the level of maintenance needed for a particular software. The variable costs for the firm are higher than the fixed costs because of the high cost of software maintenance required. The development in technology and increased in software development has made it necessary for companies to keep on updating their software. According to Shepherd (2015), this increases the cost involved in maintaining the software for the company. The company has both fixed and variable costs however, fixed costs do not vary based on quantities to a big extent as compared to the variable costs. The nature of the business makes variable costs high than the fixed cost. The company